Republican Senators Lamar Alexander, Orrin Hatch, and John Barrasso claim in a Washington Postop-ed today that they have a plan if the Supreme Court decides that health reform subsidies are no longer available to people buying coverage through federal marketplaces. Their “plan,” however, is extremely vague — perhaps intentionally so, because the details would likely show that it would make coverage less affordable for marketplace enrollees, particularly those who are older or in poorer health, and threaten the stability of the overall individual health insurance market.

The senators write that the plan would “provide financial assistance to help Americans keep the coverage they picked for a transitional period,” but they don’t furnish the most basic information about this assistance. Would people receive the same amount of help they do now, both for premiums and for deductibles and cost-sharing? How long would this transitional assistance be available? What, if any, financial assistance would be available when it expires — and if it were available, who would be eligible and for how much? The senators don’t say.

The senators also write that their plan would give states “the freedom and flexibility to create better, more competitive health insurance markets offering more options and different choices,” whether or not they have a federal marketplace. They don’t explain what this means either, but most likely it means permitting states to significantly weaken or drop health reform’s consumer protections and market reforms, as well as eliminate the individual mandate that people have coverage or pay a penalty.

Health reform established these protections for a good reason. Before health reform, insurers in the individual market could charge people with pre-existing health conditions exorbitant premiums or deny them coverage outright. They also could charge older people much higher premiums than younger people, pricing many out of coverage. And many individual-market plans had large gaps in coverage, such as no prescription drug coverage, or charged deductibles and other cost-sharing that people could not afford.

Health reform ended or limited those practices — requiring insurers to take all comers, barring them from charging sicker people more, limiting how much they can charge older people, requiring certain benefits to be covered, and establishing an annual limit on out-of-pocket costs. But to ensure that older and sicker people don’t disproportionately enroll, which would cause premiums to skyrocket, health reform also includes an individual mandate. That creates a balanced mix of people enrolled in health coverage — young and old, healthy and sick — which helps keep premiums more stable and affordable.

Permitting states to roll back these protections and eliminate the individual mandate would almost certainly make health coverage much less affordable for marketplace enrollees, particularly for people aged 50-64 and those with pre-existing health conditions. Even if some subsidies were available after the transition period, they would likely prove highly inadequate over time as plan premiums rose. That, in turn, would drive many people out of marketplace coverage and back to the ranks of the uninsured and underinsured.

The Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which along with Medicaid has played a central role in cutting the number of uninsured children to a historic low, has no new federal funding starting in October. Congress should act soon to extend CHIP — for example, by attaching a funding extension to must-pass legislation in March to avert scheduled cuts in Medicare payments to physicians.

Waiting until later in the year to fund CHIP or pursuing harmful program changes to it would make it unnecessarily difficult for states to administer their CHIP programs and risks disrupting coverage for children.

Here’s why: State legislative sessions are already entering the homestretch; Virginia adjourned Saturday, seven more states will end by April 1, and 13 others by May 1. This means states are making decisions now about their budgets for fiscal year 2016, which in most states begins on July 1. As Governors Steve Beshear (D-KY) and Bill Haslam (R-TN) wrote Congress recently on behalf of the National Governors Association, “certainty of [CHIP] funding in the near-term is needed so that states may appropriately budget and plan for their upcoming fiscal years.”

The longer Congress waits to fund CHIP, the greater the unnecessary burden it will place on states. In a recent survey, many state CHIP directors said that continued delay would force them to develop contingency plans for possible measures like moving enrollees out of state CHIP programs if federal funding runs out, updating eligibility systems to allow for the termination of coverage, and renegotiating or ending contracts with managed care plans providing CHIP coverage.

Also, if Congress pursues controversial changes that could adversely affect the program and the children who rely on it, that likely would significantly delay — and could derail — CHIP funding legislation. Draft legislation from Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) is a prime example. As we’ve explained, it would likely cause some CHIP children to become uninsured, shift large costs to states, and make the program harder for eligible children to enroll in.

Congress should instead quickly extend CHIP funding for another four years and largely continue existing policies, as bills introduced by Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Representative Gene Green (D-TX) and as the President’s 2016 budget would do.

This week on Off the Charts, we focused on the federal budget and taxes, food assistance, Disability Insurance, and state budgets.

On the federal budget and taxes, Paul Van de Water explained some of the problems with “generational accounting.” Chye-Ching Huang warned of the risks of using “dynamic scoring” for tax reform and other major legislation.

On food assistance, we excerpted Robert Greenstein’s congressional testimony on SNAP’s track record of eliminating severe hunger and malnutrition. Zoë Neuberger highlighted our new report on how many schools have adopted the community eligibility option to reduce hunger. Becca Segal called on community leaders, child advocates, and policymakers to spread the word about the benefits of community eligibility and mapped the participating schools.

These interactive maps show the extent to which eligible school districts and schools in each state have adopted community eligibility, which allows qualifying high-poverty schools to offer breakfast and lunch to all students at no charge. Along with our new report, searchable database, and guide to promoting community eligibility, they’re designed to help parent organizations, teachers, and other stakeholders in low-income communities identify which schools and school districts have taken up the option and which others could benefit from it the next school year.

The first map shows the share of eligible school districts adopting the provision; the second map shows the share of eligible schools adopting it; and the third map shows the share of highest-poverty schools adopting it. When you scroll over a state, detailed data appear. When you click on a state, the bar chart below the map displays that state’s implementation data compared to national data.

More than 14,000 high-poverty schools serving more than 6.6 million children adopted community eligibility this year. But many eligible schools in poor communities haven’t yet adopted it, which means low-income students are missing out. These resources can help school districts consider whether to adopt community eligibility for the 2015-2016 school year.

As our report on criminal justice reform explains, most states’ prison populations are at historic highs; in 36 states, the prison population has more than tripled as a share of state population since 1978 (see graph). This growth has been costly. If states were still spending on corrections what they spent in the mid-1980s, adjusted for inflation, they would have about $28 billion more each year to spend on more productive investments or a mix of investments and tax reductions.

The Brennan Center report found that while rising incarceration rates helped reduce property and violent crime rates in the 1990s, the effect was much smaller than some other studies have suggested, accounting for 0-10 percent of the total decline over the decade. Since 2000, rising incarceration rates account for less than 1 percent of the decline in crime rates.

“This report’s analysis reveals that incarceration has been decreasing as a crime fighting tactic since at least 1980,” the authors conclude. “Since approximately 1990, the effectiveness of increased incarceration on bringing down crime has been essentially zero.” Factors such as an aging population, higher earnings, lower alcohol consumption, and smarter police tactics may have done as much or more to reduce crime, according to the study.

We’ve outlined four basic ways that states can reduce their prison populations to free up funds for schools and other investments in human capital: decriminalize and reclassify certain low-level felonies, shorten prison terms and parole/probation periods, restrict the use of prison for parole violations, and divert people with mental health and substance abuse issues out of the system altogether.

In a guest TaxVox blog post for the Tax Policy Center’s series on “dynamic scoring,” I discuss some of the risks of a new House rule requiring dynamic scoring for official cost estimates of tax reform and other major legislation. Under dynamic scoring, those estimates would incorporate estimates of how legislation would affect the size of the U. S. economy and, in turn, federal revenues and spending.

Dynamic estimates vary widely depending on the models and assumptions used. I conclude that to make sense of those scores, policymakers will need more information about the models and assumptions than the House rule requires:

The House rule allows the House to use any increase in revenue from highly uncertain estimates of macroeconomic growth to pay for other policies. Policymakers will also be tempted to use a favorable dynamic estimate as proof that a policy is good for the economy and therefore should be enacted. But the uncertainty and gaps in the models may mean that such a simple conclusion isn’t appropriate. Lawmakers will need more information than the House rule requires to assess the reliability of the estimate and to understand a bill’s possible economic effects.

Testifying at a House Agriculture Committee hearing this morning, CBPP President Robert Greenstein discussed SNAP’s track record of eliminating severe hunger and malnutrition in the United States, as well as its growth in response to economic conditions and need. His oral remarks are below; click here for his written testimony.

Mr. Chairman, thank you for inviting me and for the opportunity to be here today. I’ve been working on this program for over 40 years, and had the privilege at one point in the late 1970s to serve as the Administrator of the Food and Nutrition Service.

I think Doug [Douglas Besharov, professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, who also testified] and I agree that SNAP has played the central role in eliminating severe hunger and malnutrition in this country. This led former Senator Bob Dole to call it the nation’s most important social program advance since Social Security.

And over the years, SNAP has taken advantage of modern technology and business practice to become more efficient and accurate. Its error rate is now at an all-time low. Fewer than 1 percent of benefits are issued to ineligible households.

SNAP’s benefits are relatively modest. They average about $1.40 per person per meal.

SNAP can help families bridge temporary hardship until they get back on their feet. Between 2008 and 2012, about half of all new entrants to SNAP participated for one year or less and then left the program.

SNAP also appears to have important long-term positive effects on children. A recent study [based on data from the rollout of SNAP in the late 1960s and early 1970s] found that children who had received SNAP had much higher high school graduation rates and better health — including less obesity — in adulthood than comparable low-income children who didn’t have SNAP. And women who’d had access to SNAP in childhood had higher earnings and lower rates of welfare receipt in adulthood.

Now, SNAP participation and costs have grown in recent years. Both CBO [the Congressional Budget Office] and other analysts have found the biggest reason by far is the economy. The next most important reason has been an increase in the share of eligible families — especially low-income working families — who participate.

In 2002, only 43 percent of eligible low-income working families participated. In 2012, 72 percent did.

Congress and the Bush and Clinton Administrations concluded that some aspects of SNAP were making it unnecessarily hard for working-poor families to enroll. They concluded that if families leaving welfare for low-paid work lost their SNAP benefits at the same time, and had difficulty feeding their families, that would be contrary to welfare-reform goals. Most of the policy changes, for example, that Doug lists in his testimony and were made since 2000 were made to better serve low-income working families.

As this chart indicates, SNAP has made major progress here — the share of SNAP families who are on welfare has plummeted; the share who work has increased pretty dramatically.

This brings me to the biggest cause of SNAP’s recent growth — the deep problems in the economy, from which we’re only starting now to make substantial progress. Some people look at the growth in SNAP caseloads and wonder if they’ll ever come down.

But the best assessment is that as the recovery finally reaches ordinary families, caseloads and costs will drop significantly.

That is CBO’s assessment. Caseloads have dropped by about 1.5 million people since the end of 2012 and now stand at about 46 million; CBO projects they will drop to below 33 million over the coming decade.

And, when budget analysts, whether they are conservative or liberal, ask if federal programs are growing in ways that add to the nation’s fiscal challenges, they ask if program costs are rising as a share of the economy — growing as a share of GDP. CBO’s projection for SNAP is that its costs will decline as a share of the economy as the economic recovery continues, and by 2020, be all of the way back to their 1995 level, as a share of GDP.

Finally, does SNAP discourage people from working? The conclusion of a team of leading researchers who examined all research in the field is that SNAP does not pose significant work disincentives and its effect on the amount that people work is small.

Indeed, Census data show that of people who worked before enrolling in SNAP, 96 percent then worked in the year after beginning to get SNAP benefits, which suggests turning to SNAP does not lead people to cease working.

SNAP’s work requirements are stronger than is often realized. SNAP has the single toughest work requirement of any federal program — people aged 18-50 who are not raising children are limited to three months of SNAP out of every three years, unless they’re working at least half time. Job search does not count; if you can’t find a job, you’re out after three months. This requirement was suspended in much of the country when the economy was weak, but it’s now coming back. At least 1 million such people will be removed from the program between now and the end of 2016.

Now, that doesn’t mean that SNAP can’t do better in helping people gain jobs, and the recent Farm Bill establishes demonstration projects to learn how to do that more effectively.

In conclusion, SNAP is a lifeline for millions of people. The program can be improved. But it’s worth noting that when the Simpson-Bowles commission and the Domenici-Rivlin deficit reduction task force called for substantial budget cuts, they both excluded cuts in SNAP, given its strong track record in improving access to food — and reducing poverty and hardship — for millions of our less-fortunate fellow Americans.

Community eligibility supports Congress’ longstanding goal of reducing paperwork for high-poverty schools by enabling them to offer breakfast and lunch at no charge to all students without collecting and processing individual meal applications. In its first year of nationwide implementation, more than 14,000 high-poverty schools serving more than 6.6 million children have adopted the option. Our new report and searchable database help parent organizations, teachers, and other stakeholders in low-income communities identify which school districts have adopted community eligibility and which others could benefit from it in the next school year.

We’ve measured the share of eligible school districts that implemented community eligibility in at least one school, the share of eligible schools that adopted it, and the share of the highest-poverty schools (where community eligibility is most feasible financially for districts because their federal meal reimbursements are the largest) that adopted it.

Although community eligibility was widely implemented this year, participation among eligible schools varied widely by state (see map). Many more high-poverty schools could benefit from streamlining their meal programs and freeing up resources for educational priorities. More importantly, millions more low-income children would be better able to learn if they received breakfast and lunch without hassle or stigma. This spring, school districts will have another opportunity to examine if community eligibility could benefit their schools and students.

Social Security is much more than a retirement program. It pays modest but guaranteed benefits when someone with a steady work history dies, retires, or becomes severely disabled. Although nobody likes to think that serious sickness or injury might knock them out of the workforce, a young person starting a career today has a one-third chance of dying or qualifying for DI before reaching Social Security’s full retirement age.

DI’s eligibility criteria are strict (applicants must provide convincing medical evidence from qualified sources, and most applications are denied) and its benefits modest (the average disabled worker receives $1,165 a month, and 99.4 percent get less than $2,500). DI is essential to recipients and their families, including nearly 2 million dependent children; because its benefits replace, on average, only about half of their lost earnings, DI beneficiaries are far likelier to be poor or near-poor than other Americans.

Social Security’s disability and retirement programs are closely integrated. Key features are similar or identical for the two programs, including the tax base, the work history required to become insured for benefits, the benefit formula, and cost-of-living adjustments. And at age 66, DI beneficiaries are seamlessly switched to retirement benefits without filing a fresh application. (That conversion used to occur at age 65, and the one-year delay is one of the demographic reasons behind DI’s growth.)

Despite those close links, the disability program’s trust fund is separate from the retirement and survivor program. There’s no longer any good reason for that — the 1979 Advisory Council recommended a merger of the trust funds — but lawmakers instead have relied on periodic reallocations of tax revenue between the two programs to shore up whichever trust fund needed it. They need to do so again to prevent a sudden, 20-percent cut in payments to vulnerable DI beneficiaries in 2016.

The need to replenish DI isn’t a crisis, nor would reallocating simply “kick the can down the road” as some contend. Instead it’d allow lawmakers to focus on the real task: assembling a package of revenue increases and modest benefit reforms to preserve long-term solvency for all of Social Security. Americans of all ages and incomes support Social Security and are willing to pay for it.

The topic of “generational accounting” will likely surface when economist Lawrence Kotlikoff, who helped develop the approach over 20 years ago, testifies at tomorrow’s Senate Budget Committee hearing. Generational accounting purports to compare the effects of federal budget policies on people born in different years. But it’s far more likely to obscure than illuminate the budget picture, as we have explained.

Generational accounting calculates “lifetime net tax rates” for each one-year cohort of the population through at least age 90 and a separate lifetime net tax rate for all future generations combined. Those measures are supposed to reflect each generation’s tax burden, minus the benefits it receives through programs such as Social Security and Medicare, under existing budget policies.

But generational accounting rests on several highly unrealistic assumptions. Its calculations of lifetime net tax rates assume that there would be no changes whatsoever in current law for taxes or benefit policies for anyone now alive. It doesn’t account for the benefits that government spending can have for future generations (for example, education and infrastructure spending that raises living standards). And it ignores the fact that our children and grandchildren will be richer than we are and have more disposable income, even if they pay somewhat higher taxes.

Generational accounting’s most serious flaw may be that it requires projecting such key variables as population growth, labor force participation, earnings, health care costs, and interest rates through infinity. Budget experts recognize that projections grow very iffy beyond a few decades — and spinning them out to infinity makes them much more so. The American Academy of Actuaries describes projections into the infinite future as “of limited value to policymakers.”

The Congressional Budget Office, CBPP, and other leading budget analysts focus instead on the next 25 years or so, which amply documents future fiscal pressures and presents a reasonable horizon for policymakers. These organizations produce simple, straightforward long-run projections that show the path of federal revenues, spending, and debt under current budget policies. In that way, they show clearly what’s driving fiscal pressures, and when (see chart).

Policymakers should certainly look beyond the standard ten-year horizon of most budget estimates, but they already have the tools to do that. Generational accounting is hard to interpret and easily misunderstood, and including it in the federal government’s regular budget reports and cost estimates would be a mistake.